Grid computing Vs Cloud Computing

Grid computing is sometimes is equated with cloud computing. But they are different.  Grid computing applies the resources of numerous computers in a network to work on a single problem at he same time. This is usually done to address a scientific or technical problem.

Example: C-DAC Garuda

Example: SETI

A well-known example of this is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) @Home project. In this project, people all over the world allow the SETI project to share the unused cycles of their computers to search for signs of intelligence in thousands of hours of recorded radio data.

Example 3:

Another well-known grid is the World Community Grid-Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC; see www.worldcommunity grid.org). Here you can dedicate as much or as little of your idle CPU processing power as you choose to help conduct protein-folding experiments in effort to create better and more durable rice crops to feed the world’s hungry. I bet you didn’t know you could feed the needy with your computer.

Technical details:     

• Grid computing necessitates the use of software that can divide and then send out pieces of the program to thousands of computers. It can be done throughout the computers of an organization, or it can be done as a form of public collaboration.
• Sun Microsystems offers Grid Engine software that allows engineers at companies to pool the computer cycles on up to 80 workstations at a time.

Uses of Grid Computing:

      Grid computing is appealing for several reasons:

• It is cost-effective way to use a given amount of computer resources.
• It is way it solve problems that need a tremendous amount of computing power.
• The resources of several computers can be shared cooperatively, without one computer managing the other.

 How does cloud and grid computing compare:

So, what do grid computing and cloud computing have to do with one another? Not much directly, as they function in fundamentally different ways. In grid computing, a large project is divided among multiple computers to make use of their resources. Cloud computing does just the opposite. It allows multiple smaller applications to run at the same time.